


Suspended Animation

by Raptor_Dash



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, everyone comes back from third impact, shinji is somehow still functional afterwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 04:44:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12028371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptor_Dash/pseuds/Raptor_Dash
Summary: Life goes on, and Shinji gets a delivery.





	Suspended Animation

Misato knew everything about Shinji’s heart, and so she did the best she could to give him Kaworu back.

Everyone knew everything about each other now. In time they’d forget, or try to forget, but when everyone was in the sea of life, everyone searched each other’s hearts and everyone’s hearts were one. There’d be no coming back from that, ever. People walked up and down the streets of the city just like they had before, but now it was so quiet. Everyone stared ahead in silent, palpable disbelief. Whenever anyone looked into another person’s eyes, they remembered being with that person in the sea of life and they remembered everything about them, every detail down to the deepest pits of their soul. People barely had conversations anymore; what would there be to talk about? There was nothing in anyone’s mind that everyone else on earth hadn’t already seen. People would build up their walls again in time, but they had been in the primordial sea and they had felt what it was like to interlock hearts with everyone else alive, and they knew what it was like not to have any boundaries at all. There probably wasn’t a single person walking the planet that didn’t regret crawling out of that sea. They felt the acute pain of being separate again.

That was why there was an investigation into SEELE, but not a long one, a quiet formality done just so there would be records that they had done it. Even when men came to drag Shinji to a cell somewhere and keep him monitored between court hearings, he could feel that they barely even cared whether he came with them or not, and when he gave his testimony about the events leading up to Instrumentality, it was like when he’d recited poems back in school. No feeling, just flat words that he could barely even feel passing his lips. Even when he told them about the dull thunk of Kaworu’s head hitting the LCL below him, it was like he was recounting what he’d eaten for breakfast a week ago. None of it felt real. He still wasn’t completely sure if any of this was real at all. 

Misato came to take him home after the investigation was finished. They didn’t exchange any words during the drive home, or during dinner, or right up until they said good night. They couldn’t read each other’s minds, but they knew each other so perfectly that they might as well have been able to. He barely wanted to look her in the eye now that she’d seen in detail all the grisly bits of his psyche and all the disgusting things he’d ever done to other people, and he knew without a doubt that she felt that naked shame before him too. What he wasn’t so sure about was whether she felt the same way he did—despite everything he’d seen about Misato, he still loved her, still would’ve found it comforting to hear her intoxicated yelps from the other room if she drank anymore these days. He figured it was easier to assume she hated him. Deep down, he’d always thought so anyway. 

That might’ve been the reason she lobbied to get him his own apartment in the same complex. It might’ve been because she couldn’t stand seeing him anymore, or because she didn’t want him to see her anymore, or because it was just the first step of rebuilding the interpersonal barriers that everyone was working so hard to erect. Either way, he got his own bedroom and bathroom and kitchen, and his own empty rooms to futilely cry out into at night. They gave him all the standard appliances and some furniture, and he brought in a couple of boxes of his possessions, cooking supplies and manga books. Cooking was still somewhat enjoyable, because not long ago he had seen into the hearts of chefs and people who loved to cook, and he wanted to try some of the more interesting recipes he’d seen before the memories faded. There was no point in reading any of his manga anymore, because he’d seen into the minds of their creators and almost felt like he’d written them himself. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny.

They brought in his cello too, and one evening he tried to compose a piece with it, even just a short song, to describe how it felt to be in the sea of life. None of the halfhearted chords he played came even close. Then the feeling struck him again: being in the sea had been like hearing every note ever played, sang out from every voice, harmonizing all at once. Of course it wasn’t possible to play that. He didn’t touch his cello again.

After he’d been living there for about a week, the movers came again, bringing something else. It was a big wooden box unmarked by anything but a scrawl in permanent marker on the side—a note from Misato, saying they had dug up some things from SEELE, and this wasn’t what he wanted but hopefully it was close enough. The movers left after they’d deposited the box in the middle of Shinji’s living room, and he did nothing more than glance at it for a few hours while he made salted fish for dinner. When he finally got around to cutting the box open, he nearly fell flat on his back.

It was a tank, a glass cylinder filled with what was probably LCL, and in it was Kaworu. It couldn’t have been Kaworu, there was no possible way, even if this was all just another Instrumentality fever dream it couldn’t have been him. But there he was, suspended in the orange liquid, wearing that same gentle smile that Shinji hadn’t been able to forget even when he’d tried. Those looked exactly like his fingers gently bobbing up and down, and that was his silvery hair half-floating like he was being pulled up to heaven. After Shinji was finished staring in disbelief, he staggered backwards, fell halfway over the coffee table and sobbed so hard it turned into screaming. Why would Misato send him this—whatever it was, this lifeless imitation of Kaworu? Why would she taunt him with an empty shell like that? Was this her way of expressing her deep hatred? Of course she knew this was what would hurt him the most. 

He woke up the next morning on the floor with his eyes rubbed raw, and that thing that wasn’t Kaworu was still floating in a tank in his living room. He ate leftovers for breakfast and then he staggered to his bedroom and covered himself in blankets, and even though there weren’t any tears left, his body tried to expel them anyway. He hadn’t dreamed at all the previous night, but this time he did; it wasn’t much more than a glimmer, but he woke up knowing that in his sleep he’d seen those kind red eyes again. He couldn’t stop himself from walking out and studying the face of the thing in the tank. He could feel his heart jumping and his breath wavering when he looked at that face, and he knew it wasn’t Kaworu but it looked enough like him to make Shinji’s heart rise like it had before, just a little bit. He’d considered smashing the tank and making sure he never had to look at the false boy within it again, but he noticed the gentle upward curve of its lips and its delicate silver eyelashes, and he decided it could stay.

It wasn’t until he started talking to the Kaworu-thing that he realized what Misato had really done. She must’ve known what comfort this would eventually bring him—of course she knew, she’d seen his soul, she knew everything. It was far from him to know what this thing was or what SEELE had been keeping it in their underground vaults for; that memory, along with many others, had faded. But he was glad it was there. He’d started eating his meals in the living room, sitting cross-legged in front of the tank and telling it about his day, about how everyone was trying to return to normalcy, about the expressions on all his classmates’ faces when they first returned to school and saw each other again. Sometimes he found himself asking Kaworu what he wanted for dinner, and then feeling foolish, and then wishing Kaworu had been around to join the sea of life so he’d know his heart the way he knew everyone else’s. When he got back from school every day, he immediately greeted the boy in the tank, returning the perpetual smile that he gave him. At night before bed, at least on the nights when he didn’t fall asleep on the floor bathed by the gentle glow of the orange liquid, he’d get close to the tank’s cool glass and whisper into it the things he’d wanted to say to the real Kaworu. 

He gave the Kaworu in the tank its own voice, imagined him asking about Shinji’s day and commenting on the weather, could almost hear him humming in the background late at night when the rest of the apartment was deathly quiet. When Shinji lay on the living room floor and just thought about everything that had happened, he imagined that Kaworu was peacefully keeping an eye on him from the LCL, or even laying across from him with his arms folded behind his head like he had that one night. Kaworu, just like he had been before, was a source of peace. Shinji always felt supernaturally calm, like his heart was floating in its own tank, whenever he stood and stared for hours at that pale face. Whatever was going on in his life, all he had to do was stand for a while and immerse himself in Kaworu’s smile, and he felt almost as calm as he had when he’d felt the other boy’s touch. It was like being in a trance, until one evening it wasn’t. Shinji thought he was just imagining the boy in the liquid stirring, because he usually did imagine things like that, but he looked back up at the familiar face and thought for sure that he must have been dreaming.

The Kaworu in the tank had slowly opened his eyes. He blinked a few times, looked straight at Shinji, and his smile grew.


End file.
